Blockade on apartheid move

Press, 24 January 1986, Page 18

Blockade on apartheid move

A bitter row has developed within the European Community over attempts by the British and West German Governments to block a common European stand on apartheid. London and Bonn have been quietly manoeuvring in Brussels to scupper plans to impose oil sanctions and block the sale of any European nuclear equipment to South Africa, writes Hugh O’Shaughnessy from London.

Minutes of a top-level meeting of Government representatives held in the Belgian capital in December show that the British and the West Germans are arguing about the precise sorts of oil and nuclear equipment that jgpuld be included in the trade

boycotts being sought by the Commission.

“They are squabbling about the fine print in the hope the South Africa will stop being a front-page story and they won’t have to do anything,” one senior official said.

As forecast by the “Observer,” the Council of Ministers last year announced tougher measures against the South African regime. Speaking to the European Parliament on September 11, Mr Jacques Poos, the Foreign Minister of Luxemburg, at the time the president of the Council of Ministers, said that the European Community would get tough unless the Botha regime moved quickly towards reform in South Africa. He repeated the pledge to

the Parliament last month but no concrete measures have yet been agreed though the South African situation has deteriorated.

Barbara Simons, a West German social democrat member of the European Parliament, has demanded an explanation for the delay. Last month, Christine Crawley, the Labour M.E.P. for Birmingham, wrote to Mr Poos a biting letter calling on him to announce new European measures to counter apartheid as he had several times promised. “While apartheid’s police kill hundreds of black protesters and the worst obscenities of white supremacy remain conspicuously intact, will the European Community stand idly,

uselessly by?” she asked. Willy de Clercq, the Belgian member of the European Commission in charge of relations with South Africa, acting with the support of Jacques Delors, the French president of the commission, has meanwhile decreed a freeze on contacts with South African diplomats in Brussels. Impatient with the British and West German delaying tactics, de Clercq has ordered there must be no fraternising with the South Africans. Though some day-to-day working contacts with them remain, European officials have been forbidden to have drinks or meals with South Africans.

Copyright — London Observer Service.